F1 2018 = Most Online Bugs Ever!

Precision Racing League tried to do their online pre-season league race last night on PC, and it was a disaster from start to finish. All drivers are from North America, and do ping tests to ensure their connection is adequate, so bad connections did not contribute to any of this. League Racing cannot take place with the current game bugs. Our drivers have summarized the issues we experienced:

We set up an unranked private lobby, and everyone was able to join successfully. However, multiple drivers were unable to select a car. The select button simply wasn't available, even though there were clearly multiple seats still open. We could navigate through different menus then return to the team selection screen, and occasionally, the select option would appear, but not to the point we could get it to work for everyone. We tried recreating the lobby, using a different host, creating an online championship instead of unranked. Nothing worked. Each time we tried to find a new solution, it was a different set of drivers who could no longer select their car. It wasn't consistent, so wasn't easily re-created. Eventually we invited one driver at a time, let him pick his car, then we moved onto the next driver, and it worked until the very last driver. Obviously having the host do this 19 times is very very tedious and time consuming. We do believe the last driver may have caused issues because he has special characters in his name. He has changed his Steam name, and we will re-test this soon.

At one point during our issue described in #1, we switched to classic cars to see if that would make a difference (it didn't), but after we returned to modern cars, 4 of the teams didn't show up. We were stuck at 6 teams (same number as the number of classic cars from our previous screen). We had to restart the lobby to resolve this.

Once we finally got all drivers in their car, and we started a short qualifying, three drivers were disconnected a couple of minutes into the session.

We re-invited the three drivers who were disconnected in qualifying so they could participate in the race. However, once we moved to the race, two drivers were able to re-take control of their cars, whereas the third driver was not; the Take Control option was grayed out and unavailable.

A couple of other times throughout the race, there were other groups of multiple drivers who were disconnected at once.

Each driver who disconnected was not removed from the circuit. Instead AI took control of their car. This was also true for the driver who was disconnected in qualifying, and who was unable to take control of his car at the beginning of the race; it was controlled by AI for the entire race. We obviously don't want AI cars in league racing, because all they did was drive slowly, erratically, and cause issues with other drivers.

A driver was unable to get their engine sound to return to normal after exiting the pits. It sounded like he was driving at a constant speed down the pit lane while actually driving around the track at racing speed, and he had to Alt-Tab out and back in to fix this.

We had one driver have a minor collision with another, even though there appeared to be no contact on the second driver's screen. The first driver's car flew into the air, did multiple somersaults, then ended up underneath the track where he was stuck for ~15 seconds, with engine revving, and tires spinning and smoking, before finally being reset to the circuit.

In spectate mode, lots of cars (though not all), were constantly on the rev limiter around the entire circuit, and in every gear.

We had a major collision in the middle of the main straight, but the safety car was not deployed, and the damaged car just sat there for ~15 seconds before disappearing.

A driver randomly lost force feedback on his Thrustmaster T300 and had to Alt-Tab out and back in to fix this.

By the end of the race, out of the 19 drivers who started, we had only 3 human drivers on circuit, along with 9 AI drivers.

Codemasters, please tell us what you're going to do to fix this in F1 2018?

What are you going to do to prevent it from happening in F1 2019 and beyond? Can we please have an open beta so that you can have the community find these bugs and test online stability before release, not after. If there are FOM limitations, I'm sure you could at least just give us generic cars with no liveries. It's frustrating beyond belief that this not only happens every single year, but that it now seems to have become worse instead of better.

Comments

I've been paying for this game since 2010, so 8 years of purchasing your games. How can you release those games and patches without testing ?

Every year is the same story, you break the game every time you release a patch. Where's the quality control department ? What is the testing department doing ? I honestly cannot believe this in 2018. You have been doing this for the last 8 years.....

I'm getting sick of your patch notes too:

Multiplayer

Improved game stability and various other fixes

When I see this now, it means to me that you break the game. So elaborate those various other fixes....

I wonder how much this has to do with Patch 1.0.5. Every year it seems like the PC version always has the most bugs because it is a port.

We will test tonight on PS4 and I will let you know what issues we run into there.

We just did a practice run in our league on PS4, 19 drivers + 2 spectators. Had the same issues that moogleslam described. Well, not all, but the game disconnected several players at once a few times, the rev stuck sometimes etc. Also, one of our drivers spun out, the car behind passed him, and got a 5sec stop-n-go for overtaking under yellow flag... We were planning to start the new season of our league next week, but it's delayed for indefinite time, because this game is simply unsuitable for such purpose.

Omg, can't you just play? Honestly? Everything has bug, even a MacBook pro that cost 3000euros has bugs. Your body has bugs. Real f1 cars have bugs. Just play the game, which is awesime: a bug screws up your race? Whatever, it's not like you've lost something special in your life... Play that race again

Omg, can't you just play? Honestly? Everything has bug, even a MacBook pro that cost 3000euros has bugs. Your body has bugs. Real f1 cars have bugs. Just play the game, which is awesime: a bug screws up your race? Whatever, it's not like you've lost something special in your life... Play that race again

Sometimes im ashamed to be the same species as someone like this,this is what evolution has brought us to.

Omg, can't you just play? Honestly? Everything has bug, even a MacBook pro that cost 3000euros has bugs. Your body has bugs. Real f1 cars have bugs. Just play the game, which is awesime: a bug screws up your race? Whatever, it's not like you've lost something special in your life... Play that race again

Sometimes im ashamed to be the same species as someone like this,this is what evolution has brought us to.

Ouch, this comment explains everything. If saying "it's just a game" about - listen carefully - a game, makes you doubt the evolution of the human species... Well... I'm with you man! I agree: if a kid's toy is so important for you, we do have indeed a big BUG in the evolution!

Some people here are funny with "codemasters won't listen/do anything" guess we should just revert back to patch 1.04 or 1.03 and have cars teleport to pits yes? It's annoying that there are always a few things that are bugged/broken and don't get fixed in time before they start working on next seasons game I agree but that's not saying codies don't listen.

Omg, can't you just play? Honestly? Everything has bug, even a MacBook pro that cost 3000euros has bugs. Your body has bugs. Real f1 cars have bugs. Just play the game, which is awesime: a bug screws up your race? Whatever, it's not like you've lost something special in your life... Play that race again

Some people here are funny with "codemasters won't listen/do anything" guess we should just revert back to patch 1.04 or 1.03 and have cars teleport to pits yes? It's annoying that there are always a few things that are bugged/broken and don't get fixed in time before they start working on next seasons game I agree but that's not saying codies don't listen.

They often listen, just not sure if they hear. There are cases where we know they haven't heard as entire threads get to multiple pages without a response.

The only thing I would put money on is that you can expect teleporting cars on launch next year too.

Omg, can't you just play? Honestly? Everything has bug, even a MacBook pro that cost 3000euros has bugs. Your body has bugs. Real f1 cars have bugs. Just play the game, which is awesime: a bug screws up your race? Whatever, it's not like you've lost something special in your life... Play that race again

I understand your opinion, but let me explain my point of view, and I'm sure you'll understand mine as well.We put a lot of effort in organizing our weekly races, and it took years to get 24 good drivers (20 regular + 4 substitutes), who are willing to make free every thursday night for some quality racing. We have two commentators, who are streaming and commentating every race for our ~500 viewers (not much, but good enough for us). What we expect from a full priced game is not much, just to work as intended. F1 2017 had bugs as well, even before 2018 is released (so after 1 year of patching), but okay, those were not game-breaking. The most usual one was that the host player disconnected between the formation lap and race start. Okay, made a new session, set the grid order manually, 10 mins and 20% of viewers lost. We can live with that.But the fact, that we simply can't get this one to work properly because these serious issues is more than frustrating. Having bugs is one thing, but a full priced game being useless in a private online lobby is another one. I mean what the duck did these guys were doing in the past year? Drawing halos, recording audio for the interview questions and made this basic ranking system? Is that it? While F1 2011 on xbox360 could manage 20 players in a single lobby without issues, F1 2018 on PS4 or PC can't? This is wrong, and not just a bit. It's very disappoinging.

Omg, can't you just play? Honestly? Everything has bug, even a MacBook pro that cost 3000euros has bugs. Your body has bugs. Real f1 cars have bugs. Just play the game, which is awesime: a bug screws up your race? Whatever, it's not like you've lost something special in your life... Play that race again

I really thought you were just at troll, but then you tried to back up what you were saying, so now I'm not so sure, but I'll bite either way and respond.

No, we can't just play. We can't play at all. If you read the first post, you would have understood that. We have lived with bugs in this game for 8 years, and we will do everything we can to deal with them or find a work around, but currently, that is not even an option. There are bugs and then there are game breaking bugs, and people use that term quite loosely to make a point, but in this case, we truly have bugs that break a portion of the game, and make it so that drivers cannot participate despite our best efforts.

When I go to play basketball, and the ball is totally flat, and my sneakers don't fit, and I am forced to spectate instead of play, and when I get stuck underneath the court for 15 seconds, no, it's not fun.

Omg, can't you just play? Honestly? Everything has bug, even a MacBook pro that cost 3000euros has bugs. Your body has bugs. Real f1 cars have bugs. Just play the game, which is awesime: a bug screws up your race? Whatever, it's not like you've lost something special in your life... Play that race again

You sir, are the Codemasters DREAM! Sounds like they could sell you anything